Aberdeen's (a tech consulting firm) Bill Claybrook is looking at how Linux is overtaking Windows in the marketplace, in his web log he had an interesting comment regarding Gentoo being used as a Desktop in an electronic trading company based in NY:

Quote:

[Posted by Bill Claybrook on 2003.07.15 - 2:52 ET]

NYFIX Switching to Linux

Yesterday I spoke to a systems analyst from NYFIX, an electronic trading company based in the New York area. NYFIX is in the process of transitioning from Windows to Linux  a decision the company says it is making due to uptime problems with Windows. The company tired of having to shut down Windows to do patches.

Today, NYFIX still has some Windows-based servers, but it has moved many of its workloads to Dell 1U servers and to IBMs HS-20 blade servers running Red Hat 7.3. The company will eventually move the remaining Windows server workloads to Linux. It is also using SUSE 8.0 for some applications.

NYFIX says that its total cost of ownership is 40% lower after moving to Linux. Another migration will be Oracle on Solaris to Oracle on Red Hat Linux on IBM blade servers. NYFIX intends eventually to move all server workloads to blade servers with an estimated savings of 50% in facility space. NYFIX says that the use of Computer Associates software management products is key to keeping its management costs under control, helping reduce the TCO.

To save even more money, NYFIX is moving its Windows desktop users to Gentoo Linux. Gentoo Linux is downloaded for free and then compiled from the source. In the survey for my upcoming report How fast is Linux replacing Unix?, I will be asking a couple of questions about why users are migrating to Linux and I expect the answer to one of the questions to surely be lower TCO.

If you are an IT buyer/end user and would like to participate in this survey -or if you would like to share your company's Linux experience with me- please drop me a note at bill.claybrook@aberdeen.com .